As soon as Disney bought Marvel, one question popped up and hasn’t gone away since: will Pixar make a movie with Marvel characters? The revered animation studio has already come close, as Brad Bird’s The Incredibles is a better Fantastic Four movie than either of the two live-action movies released by Fox.

In general, however, various Pixar shot-callers have said that it isn’t happening; Pixar is focused on making original films (or sequels to its own original films) and hasn’t really gotten into bed with Marvel, common corporate overseers notwithstanding.

But as Pixar chief John Lasseter is doing press for Brave during a summer in which Marvel is triumphant thanks to The Avengers, the question has risen again. So what about it, Mr. Lasseter? Will Pixar make a Marvel movie? No? How about now? What about…. now?

Well, I can’t say anything about that because Marvel just got—[they’ve] been a couple years as part of the Disney company, we’ve been six years as part of the Disney company. And at Pixar, we stay focused on making original films. Even our sequels are kind of created internally and we come up with ideas [on our own]. I’m also leading the Walt Disney Animation Studio and all of that. These studios are filmmaker driven studios, so if a filmmaker comes to me and says, ‘Hey, I wanna do this,’ then I would be really open to it.

That’s a good-natured, open-ended negative, but still a negative. Nice to know that if someone (ahem, Brad Bird) wanted to make a Marvel movie, there’s a possibility for that to happen. But above everything else, a Pixar/Marvel film would require a level of cooperation between the two semi-independent companies that doesn’t seem very likely to happen. Maybe if Pixar wanted to make a film with Marvel characters that sat slightly outside the film continuity Marvel has so carefully established… but then the likely success of that effort, simply by virtue of being a Pixar film, could change what people wanted out of Marvel.